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Celebrity Travel Spotlight: Singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey

Milwaukee singer/songwriter Peter Mulvey returns with his first full length album of original songs in five years “Silver Ladder,” which was released April 1.

After a turbulent stretch in his personal life left him marooned, Peter decided to climb his way out. “I’ve been through it. I bet you have too, but there are times in life when you turn a corner and suddenly everything is simple: let’s make some songs, people! Let’s play!”

He committed to writing one song a week. The songs came flooding out over the weeks and months, and within a year he had more than enough for a new record. The album was his first Kickstarter campaign, successfully funded reaching the goal of $60,000.

Peter’s next stop is Tarrytown on April 22, with Ani Di Franco. Check his Tour Page for dates in your city. As someone who has seen much of this country through touring, here are some of Peter’s favorite places…

My favorite place in the U.S. to visit is…Alaska. Because it’s all still alive. Because there are more square miles than people. Because of the borealis. Because people go there to get away and many of them actually have gotten away. Because wolves. Because moose. Because at thirty nine below, a cup of boiling water chucked into the air comes down as ice while going up as vapor. Because in February, those people show up to your show, because they have to!

The first thing I do when I go to Alaska is I go to…I go for a hike. The internet, the inside of airplanes and the insides of airports, the blare of talk radio: all of this disappears in the immense, immense silence of the landscape.

Everyone should visit…Ano Nuevo State Beach, California. Two reasons I love it, probably only one of which will ever happen to you: First, there’s usually several hundred elephant seals just kinda hanging out (with the world’s most useless sign next to them: keep back 25 feet from the elephant seals. Seriously? They’re the size of Toyotas. No need to tell me to keep back!) And secondly, on the way there, there’s a gravel lot on the Pacific Ocean where the hang-gliders take off. I pulled over to watch them ride up the thermals and then circle back down. And then one of them gently glided down, stepped out of his rig, looked right at me, and said, “No way! Peter Mulvey?!?!?” This actually happened to me. A human being, a primate, glided out of the sky and spoke my name. I’ll never be the same.

Columbia, South Carolina…is a super-hip little town. Just worth strolling through, little cafes, little galleries. I swear, these kids with tattoos on their forearms are saving our national soul. They’re brewing beer and waxing their mustaches and riding fixies and turning this place back into something other than the homogenized strip mall we’ve struggled to become from my childhood onward.

My favorite restaurant in the U.S. is…the Cafe Carpe, Fort Atkinson, WI. It is the beating heart of a small midwestern town. The jambalaya is comforting, the pizza is a good, good thing. The old ladies play bridge there. The folk club in the back is one of the premiere American listening rooms. The wait staff, the cook… every night, they are a tableau, a little play written by some undersung literary genius. Kitty puts cinnamon in the coffee. It’s bad coffee. But it’s good bad coffee.

The best place to find…tacos is La Super Rica, Santa Barbara, CA. It’s so righteous. The old ladies make the tortillas. The young men work the grill. The young ladies are somewhere out of sight. Isidoro, the owner, when you ask him about what it was like to have Julia Child visit, he beams, and says “She was… so humane.”

My favorite airport in the U.S. is…Denver because the moving walkways go on for what appears to be infinity. It’s like the afterlife. Punch-drunk at the end of a tour on no sleep, I can glide along those walkways and see into the souls of my fellow travelers. I wrote a song about it. It’s magical.

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With talk of the state of our economy and the outsourcing of jobs, this blog was created in an attempt to help spur on travel within the U.S. and support our local economies. We will regularly spotlight a different city, state, or region and an eatery in that area. Whether it’s your own town, or across the state border, perhaps one of these events or places will pique your interest to visit it.